Readers' comments

a price tag is a good attempt in the right direction for to understand nature's value. but better still is to put value of nature in terms of how much years it adds (or reduces) to one's life based on location.

Many have criticised the intention of putting a price tag on the environment due to so many reasons. Some say it is unethical to “price the priceless” while some others question the validity and reliability of the methodology and estimated monetary figures. It would have been great had the writer had added a line how the estimation was done.
Nonetheless, even though estimating the monetary value of something as abstract as the environment is seemingly extremely difficult I do agree with the fact that such figures help politicians to make a wise and well informed decision by carefully assessing the trade-offs between environmental conservation and economic objectives.

YES!!! I love the concept behind this article; it makes man stop and consider it's affects of the environment and forces us to recognize that treating the enviornment should be high on our priority list. It is sad that a price tag has to be put everything for us to stop and consider it, especially the enviornment. Hopefully, with this new system in mind, citizens and policy makers will realize their are consequences of their actions that can even effect the bane of human existance.

Replacement cost can tell the story behind valuing the nature, I truly believe that we, as human can fairly estimate something, after we know it and its utilitarian value.
Stop me if I am wrong but we still explore the nature and do know little about.
To me,when it comes the nature, valuation theory is noway mechanism. There is too much variables in nature that it can be contained in theory.

@Nschomer, the value of 300 i would presume is per person, and estimated as a willingness to pay, calculated by such methods as hedonic pricing. To completely value global services is somewhat meaningless too, change needs to happen on a local scale, globally, so individual values will be more useful to inform de vision makers, consumers included.

All figures an environmental economist presents have to be conservative to be of any use to inform policy. The same is true of any health economic assessments. Valuing the environment is essential to ensuring the continued survival of the Human race. The methods we have are continually being improved, but as this is a relatively young field, of a relatively young science, estimates will continue to reflect the lowest bound of the true value of nature. This is inconsequential, previously no value has been given to life support systems provided by the biosphere, so any improvement on this is a step in the right direction. I congratulate this article and look forward to many more in the same vein, so thank you for it. We have an imperfect system but we have to work within the system which we are in in order to effect any change.

2.5 trillion seems rather ridiculously low a figure for overall value of our biosphere, too. When we're willing to pay $200,000 plus in medical bills in a year to keep a single person alive, a value of $350/person/year seems a rather pathetically low valuation for unpolluted air and fresh, clean drinking water.

Personally I think three hundred pounds per year for view of green space is VASTLY undervaluing it. I'm not sure exactly how you would come to a solid quantitative analysis of the benefit (you mention only health benefits), but you could probably use figures related to treatment of seasonal affective disorder (a malady which I would maintain affects approximately 100% of New Englanders). As for non-health related value, check out the difference in price between a basement apartment and the floor directly above it, or how much more people are willing to pay for a place "with a view". Hard to get a precise and easily agreed upon figure, to be sure, but I think far greater than the figure quoted.